Ingham County will spend $56.8 million in federal funding to recover from COVID-19. The spending will be divided into two phases.
Ingham County Controller Gregg Todd said the first round of spending ranged from June 2021 through May 2022, and aims to help those hit hardest by COVID.
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Four Senate Republicans announced bills they called the “Parent’s Bill of Rights.”
In a morning press conference, Sens. Justin Eichorn of Grand Rapids, Michelle Benson of Ham Lake, Paul Gazelka of East Gull Lake, and Roger Chamberlain of Lino Lakes announced the bills they said would increase school transparency.
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The House of Delegates passed SB 739, which will require schools to make masks optional. After Republicans were surprised by bipartisan votes in the Senate last week to amend the bill to include the mask clause and to pass the bill, Republicans hustled the bill through the necessary House committee hearing and through three required floor sessions, including a two-minute-long pro-forma session on Sunday. By 1 p.m. on Monday, Republicans had already delivered the bill to Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has committed to adding an emergency clause to make it take effect immediately.
After Youngkin adds the clause, both chambers can pass the bill and emergency clause with simple majority votes, setting up the bill to be law and in effect potentially by the end of the week, House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Scott) said on The John Fredericks Show Monday morning.
“Once we adopt his [Youngkin’s] amendments, he’s already signed it and sent it back, it’ll be the law, and we can put this behind us,” Kilgore told The Virginia Star’s publisher, John Fredericks.
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Eight Michigan counties will end school mask mandates on or before Feb. 28, citing lower COVID metrics.
The Health Department of Northwest Michigan, which covers Antrim, Charlevoix, Emmet and Otsego counties, will repeal its mask mandate for schools on February 17, followed by Ingham County on February 19, and Oakland, Washtenaw, and Wayne County will drop their mask mandates on February 28.
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“In critical moments,” said Star Trek’s master of logic, Mr. Spock, “men sometimes see exactly what they wish to see.”
Apparently so. The truth of this statement hit me like a bolt of lightning recently when a friend relayed his experience at a medical clinic. It seems the ignorance and lack of rational thinking in our medical system is even worse than I imagined.
It all started when my friend John, a man in his mid-60s, went to the doctor to fill out forms and answer questions before undergoing an in-house surgery. After about 30 minutes of taking his history, the nurse asked him if he had taken the COVID vaccine. John replied that he had not—a fact he had already told the office secretary when he made his appointment—but that he was prepared to take tests to see if he was positive for the virus.
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The Ohio House has passed a bill that would give employers $25,000 in tax credits to train new drivers in an effort to help companies across the state alleviate a growing truck driving shortage.
House Bill 197, backed by trucking and business organizations, now heads to the Senate. It passed the House, 97-0, this week.
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Police in Ontario on Sunday arrested protesters still blocking the Ambassador Bridge, seeking to clear the major trade route between Canada and the United States after days of COVID-19 restriction protests that captured the world’s attention.
Windsor police told the Associated Press that arrests began and vehicles were towed starting just after dawn at the bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario — the busiest northern border crossing to the U.S.
“Television images showed officers detaining protesters. Only two pickup trucks and less than a dozen protesters blocked the road to the bridge before police moved in. Afterward, police barricades remained and it was not immediately clear when the bridge might be opened,” AP reported.
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Though alarming and depressing, we can no longer avoid recognizing that America’s greatest domestic threat is from pro-government extremists.
We rue that pro-government extremists caused immense destruction during their less-than-“peaceful protests” in 2020; and we witness the continuing damage caused by their neurotic, totalitarian response to a plethora of problems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic..
Indeed, what makes the pro-government extremists so dangerous is their far greater numbers than their anti-government extremist counterparts. Their noxious ideology that the citizen is subordinate to the omnipotent state is incessantly “normalized” and propagandized by their corporate media comrades.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week released data showing that effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine booster wanes markedly in the months following that shot, though the agency still said uptake of the booster is important for fighting against the virus.
The agency said in a press release that studies showed effectiveness against COVID-19 emergency department and urgent care incidents “was 87% and 91%, respectively, during the 2 months after a third dose [of the booster],” but that it “decreased to 66% and 78% by the fourth month after a third dose.”
The CDC said that “protection against hospitalizations exceeded that against ED/UC visits” with the shot.
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Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA-02) criticized efforts to regulate congressional stock trading which Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA-07) is championing.
“So my thoughts on it, you know, I think this whole concept is bull***t. Because I think that, why would you assume that members of Congress are going to be inherently bad or corrupt? We already have the STOCK Act that requires people to report stock trades. Why would you assume – I mean, the people that you’re electing to represent you, it makes no sense that you’re going to automatically assume that they’re going to use their position for some nefarious means or to benefit themselves. So I’m very strongly opposed to any legislation like that,” Luria told Punchbowl News this week.
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Two years after COVID burst on the American scene, leading to lockdowns, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and trillions of dollars in emergency government spending, the question on many minds is: When will the emergency end?
The answer to that question is not an easy one. An examination of past emergencies does not resolve it. Rather, it is clear that emergency situations, including this one, may be understood through various lenses, yielding different perspectives on what the endpoint will be.
Take, by way of comparison, World War II, an emergency that had at least four distinct endings because it had at least four distinct faces:
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Connecticut children cannot be certain they can finally be free of wearing masks in school since, although Gov. Ned Lamont (D) said he would end the state school mask mandate by February 28, that plan may depend on the legislature voting to extend his pandemic emergency powers, and then on individual school districts.
In his State of the State address Wednesday, Lamont told residents he will roll back some coronavirus restrictions, including the school mask mandate, adding, “You have earned this freedom.”
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Amid the controversy over world-famous Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan hosting guest Dr. Robert Malone, credited with inventing mRNA vaccine technology that is used in COVID-19 vaccines, Malone revealed information about a massive conflict of interest.
On an episode of Tucker Carlson Today that aired Wednesday, Malone revealed that the largest stakeholder in Spotify, which has been under pressure to censor Rogan for spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19, is also the largest stakeholder in Moderna, one of the two companies distributing mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.
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As the mid-term elections approach, a number of Democrat governors are now following in the steps of Republican Governors Ron DeSantis (FL) and Glenn Youngkin (VA) in support of dropping mask mandates.
Supported by their political and media allies, the governors of states, including New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, California, and Oregon are now announcing mask mandates in schools may be dropped soon, as the New York Times reported Tuesday.
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Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).
MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.
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The U.S. trade deficit continued to grow in December as the import-export gap widened to record highs in 2021, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
The trade deficit grew by 1.8% in December 2021 to $80.7 billion, the Census Bureau announced Tuesday, $1.4 billion above the revised figure from November 2021.
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An Albert Lea woman who was sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating Gov. Tim Walz’s COVID-19 executive orders was released from custody Saturday morning.
Lisa Hanson, owner of The Interchange Wine and Coffee Bistro, refused to close her business when Gov. Walz ordered all bars and restaurants in the state to shut down. She was found guilty of six misdemeanors as a result.
Prosecutors argued for a $500 fine and several days in jail, but Judge Joseph Bueltel wanted to make an example out of Hanson, which he made clear in court. Bueltel reprimanded Hanson for “making money” while “suckers down the street closed.”
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In yet another scandal involving Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS), an email published on Twitter shows school security officials told school administrators to seek warrants from magistrate judges to arrest students who refused to wear masks.
An email from security head John Clark, posted on Twitter by commentator Ned Ryun, shows Clark giving teachers instructions on February 1 about how to obtain those warrants. The instructions were given just after the school vowed to defy Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who banned mask mandates on his first day in office.
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Amid controversy over podcaster Joe Rogan’s controversial COVID-19 episodes and some past episodes that contained racial slurs, one video streaming platform is lending Rogan their support.
“We stand with you, your guests, and you legion of fans in desire for real conversation,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said in a letter addressed to Rogan. “So we’d like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place.”
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In New Brunswick, Canada, a father of three lost custody of his children after a single judge ruled that his unvaccinated status was a danger to his children.
According to USA Today, the concerned father presented evidence to the judge that pointed out possible harmful effects of the Pfizer-BioTech vaccine, as proof that his concerns about taking the vaccine were valid. But Justice Nathalie Godbout, of the Court of Queen’s Bench, ruled against him by simply deferring to “public health officials” as being superior to his own research.
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The Left has a word for misinformation that turns out to be true. They call it, “misinformation.” Over and over again, the tech giants, cheered on by power-drunk government officials, have censored and deplatformed people who have contradicted the official narrative regarding COVID and heavy-handed public health measures that restrict freedom with dubious health benefits.
Tellingly, the demands to censor Joe Rogan rarely identify the supposed “misinformation” he peddled. Even more tellingly, the censors totally fail to acknowledge that Rogan-promoted “conspiracy theories” have a better track record than many of the articles of faith his critics promoted.
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Members of the Republican Governors Association (RGA) on Monday launched a new digital ad in Georgia that highlights a photo of elementary-aged school children wearing COVID-19 masks behind Stacey Abrams, who was maskless. The five-figure ad will run on multiple social media platforms starting this week, members of the RGA said in a statement.
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Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams is facing criticism for posing for photos with school children while not wearing a COVID-19 mask.
In now-deleted Twitter posts, Abrams is seen seated on the floor without a mask while several children on each side are each wearing one.
Abrams, a Georgia gubernatorial candidate and nationally known Democrat politician, like other fellow, high-profile party members is being accused of being hypocritical about the mask mandates that many elected Democrats across the country have required people to wear during the pandemic.
Abrams has championed more stringent masking policies in schools, according to CNN.
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The upstart crowdfunding website GiveSendGo on Saturday restarted a funding drive in support of the Canadian trucker protests, quickly raising a massive $1 million just hours after the fund was dropped by the larger platform GoFundMe.
GoFundMe had cancelled the funding drive after it had raised a whopping $10 million, claiming that the protest itself had turned into a violent “occupation” and that it violated the company’s terms of service.
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The COVID-19 vaccine exemption process in the Marine Corps gives no consideration to the faiths of individual soldiers and could hamper military readiness, according to Marines fighting the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate on religious grounds who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation anonymously out of fear of retribution.
As of Friday, 95% of active duty members of the Marine Corps were fully vaccinated, and another 2% were partially vaccinated, Department of Defense (DOD) spokesperson Maj. Charlie Dietz told the DCNF. A total of 334 Marines have been separated with a vaccine refusal discharge code. The Marine Corps has received 3,538 religious exemption requests, and only three were approved, out of 3,414 requests that were processed.
The Secretary of Defense issued a memorandum on Aug. 24, requiring that all service members be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a matter of readiness.
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A Canadian movement of truckers protesting the country’s vaccine mandate has inspired a similar protest in the U.S., with a convoy expected to arrive at the nation’s capital next month. That movement, though, sparked controversy beyond its protest this weekend after a run-in with the popular online fundraiser, GoFundMe.
GoFundMe announced it would refund more than $10 million in donations to donors of the “Freedom Convoy” online fundraiser after threats of a fraud investigation from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis threatened the investigation after GoFundMe reportedly froze the fundraising account Friday and said they would give the funds to another charity of Freedom Convoy’s choice.
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Sixteen states again are challenging a federal COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health care workers who work at facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Friday’s filing in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana comes after the issuance of final guidance on the mandate from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS), arguing the guidance is an action that is reviewable.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled by 5-4 vote Jan. 13 against the original Louisiana challenge to the mandate and a similar Missouri filing.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost wants to hear from Ohioans impacted by GoFundMe’s initial decision to refund or redirect donations given to demonstrators protesting COVID-19 restrictions in Canada, according to a press release by Yosts’s office.
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Federal officials in Atlanta have charged 22 people nationwide, including Georgia, with wire fraud conspiracy and other charges in an alleged scheme to obtain nearly $4 million in COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. This, according to a press release that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia published this week.
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The Big Board in the H Street neighborhood of Washington, D.C. was given a notice by city health officials Tuesday that the establishment was being shut down due to its “disobedience of COVID-19 guidelines,” according to FOX News.
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A newly-released study from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University revealed that the sweeping lockdowns in response to the Chinese coronavirus had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was conducted through an analysis of 24 different studies that all focused on government mandates ordering the closure of various aspects of everyday life, including school and business shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and stay-at-home orders, among others.
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Ohio’s seven-day COVID-19 case rate has now fallen to about the same level of seven-day cases as the state saw in mid-September, when the more deadly Delta variant was the virus’ prominent strain.
As of February 2, Ohio had an average seven-day case rate of 7,806, a drastic drop in that average over a period of just two weeks, according to publicly available data. On January 19, the seven-day average caseload was 27,462 cases.
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Though children are least likely to experience severe illness from COVID-19, the level of mental health distress many are exhibiting during the government’s response to the pandemic is “utterly devastating,” child psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald said in a recent interview.
The Los Angeles-based clinician expressed his concern during a late November podcast for the Unity Project, an organization working to end COVID-19 vaccine mandates for healthy children in grades K-12.
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Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers updated residents of the state on his latest efforts to spend more than $4 billion given to the state from coronavirus relief funds.
According to the governor, $1.3 billion has been directed to economic initiatives, roughly $1 billion for “community building,” and more than $500 million for education and child care.
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An Iowa representative introduced Tuesday a bill that would allow parents to watch live footage of their children in public school classrooms.
“I think we need to showcase the great work our teachers do,” Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, a farmer, told The Center Square in a phone interview Tuesday.
He said that through the COVID-19 pandemic, parents learned they wanted to be more involved, and this is a mechanism of facilitating parental involvement.
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Tennessee Deputy Attorney General Janet Kleinfelter argued in court last week that reports that a government-hired consultant filed regarding COVID-19 should remain exempt from the public. This, according to a new column that The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG) recently published. The TCOG, according to its website, promotes open government and citizen access to public information.
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The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of conflicting signals on whether the nation should remain under a COVID national emergency or move on to an endemic “new normal.”
Comedian Bill Maher’s “I don’t want to live in your mask-paranoid world anymore” monologue went viral last week, just days after the Atlantic, the standard-bearer journal for the liberal intelligentsia, ran a story headlined: “COVID Parenting Has Passed the Point of Absurdity.” Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photo of a woman frozen in a more desperate and primal state of panic than the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Omicron, for most people without co-morbidities, produces much milder symptoms than do the coronavirus’s previous variants, but it’s far more infectious, racing through schools, shutting down classrooms and forcing parents to consult their district’s ever-shifting COVID “decision trees” on a seemingly daily basis.
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Inspired by their Canadian brethren, American truckers have decided to form their own nationwide “Convoy to DC” in protest of the Biden regime’s authoritarian COVID policies.
The group’s Facebook page, Convoy to DC 2022, already has over 131,000 thousand followers.
“We are part of many large groups who believe in our founding fathers. We believe everyone has a voice. We support our freedom. Help us spread the word about this group and together we all can make it a better place. God Bless America,” the page reads.
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Allegations that “masks work” and “don’t cause harm” have been enforced by governments and corporations around the world for more than 18 months through arrests, firings, censorship, fines, and denial of access to schools, supermarkets, hospitals, streets, and other public spaces. This has made it virtually impossible for many people to live without complying with mask mandates.
In recent weeks, however, more medical scholars and media outlets are coming to grips with facts about masks that Just Facts has been documenting for more than a year and painstakingly compiled in a September 2021 article sourced with more than 50 peer-reviewed science journals. Here’s a sample of people who are speaking up about the facts and their implications:
Dr. Vinay Prasad—an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco—has written an article that examines the scientific evidence for masking children and concludes that:
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After students at George Mason University (GMU) fought the school’s administration on mandatory booster shots for COVID-19, the school Monday announced that it has scrapped the mandate, though it did not credit the students for their efforts.
“George Mason University announced today it will strongly encourage students who remain unvaccinated to get the COVID-19 vaccine and booster, but no longer require it, in observance of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ opinion,” the school said in a message written by President Gregory Washington.
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Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed.
Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.
Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.
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The Ohio State University is adjusting some COVID-19 health and safety protocols for students, faculty, staff and visitors, according to a Monday press release by the university.
In a message from Senior Vice President for Student Life Melissa Shivers and Senior Vice President and Wolfe Foundation Endowed Athletics Director Gene Smith, Buckeyes are asked to follow “local and university mask mandates, appropriate physical distancing, availability of PPE and hand sanitizer, limited distribution of literature and other items, and any other recommendations event planners, coordinators and public health advisors may have” when it comes to in-person gathering.
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The United States is an outlier among established democracies in two respects: We face both falling social trust and rising polarization. I have argued that the two dynamics connect in a doom loop. Trust in others and institutions falls, leading to greater polarization, which drives trust down even more. That is why the two processes are getting worse at the same time. A nasty dynamic has taken hold in the country, and it regularly affects all of us.
Many issues polarize us, but we should prefer polarization on economics to polarization on culture. Polarization is least damaging on issues most amenable to “splitting the difference”—as many economic issues are.
Consider taxes. Progressives want higher taxes on the rich, while conservatives want lower taxes. The possibility of compromise always exists—and even if it is obscured beneath the surface of our political tempers, uncovering it is not hard. For example, we could average our preferred tax rates, and no one would come away emptyhanded. Granted, that’s not how we have handled this issue in the past, but it’s at least conceivable.
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A Virginia mother addressed her children’s school board Thursday night regarding the district’s mask mandate, which subverts Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order allowing parents to choose whether or not to mask their children in school.
A Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) mother, Carrie Lukas, condemned the school board for requiring children to mask up for school while “across Virginia, right now, adults are gathering in gyms, bars and clubs and laughing together maskless.”
“Yet my five kids spent all day today, eight hours, in masks in Fairfax County Public Schools,” she said. “My first grader has never been inside his school without a mask. He’s never had a chance to smile at his friends or hear his teachers’ unmuffled voice, and it is outrageous and ridiculous.”
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Google temporarily suspended conservative talk show host Dan Bongino’s website, Bongino.com, from its ads service, a company spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Friday.
“We have strict publisher policies in place that explicitly prohibit misleading and harmful content around the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrably false claims about our elections,” the spokesperson said. “When publishers persistently breach our policies we stop serving Google ads on their sites. Publishers can always appeal a decision once they have addressed any violating content.”
The spokesperson added that while Google would not disclose the specific offending content on Bongino.com, the website had been subject to frequent reviews and Google had flagged content in violation of its policies.
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Virginia’s Attorney General released a legal opinion Friday saying that under Virginia law, vaccine mandates for college students are illegal.
“Absent specific authority conferred by the General Assembly, public institutions of higher education in Virginia may not require vaccination against COVID-19 as a general condition of students’ enrollment or in-person attendance,” Attorney General Jason Miyares said in his opinion.
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The Michigan House approved a range of bills that aim to reform the embattled Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) that has mishandled at least $8.5 billion since March 2020.
When the UIA acknowledged losing $4 billion of taxpayer money, it admitted: “mistakes were made.”
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Knox County Health Department officials announced 39 additional COVID-19 deaths among county residents on Wednesday for the current reporting period of January 16 through January 22. But Knox County Health Department officials also said 10 of those deaths occurred not this month but in previous months. They said they will add those deaths to their charts according to their dates of death.
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut its global economic growth forecast for 2022 on Tuesday, citing growing COVID-19 cases, supply chain bottlenecks and soaring inflation.
The IMF now projects global gross domestic (GDP) product to grow 4.4% in 2022, down from 5.9% growth in 2021, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report published Tuesday. The IMF projected global GDP would reach 4.9% in its Fall report.
“The global economy enters 2022 in a weaker position than previously expected,” the report said, blaming “downside surprises,” including soaring COVID-19 cases and turbulent markets.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and staff at the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) this week released projected data that predates COVID-19 and compared it to student’s actual TCAP scores. They said in a press release that they did this to measure the pandemic’s impact on student achievement via the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) public site. State officials use the site annually to measure students’ overall growth.
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